


To lose a brother

by Fishandchickennuggetsplease



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/F, Family, Hurt/Comfort, Soft Girlfriends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-12
Updated: 2018-05-12
Packaged: 2019-05-05 20:12:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14626185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fishandchickennuggetsplease/pseuds/Fishandchickennuggetsplease
Summary: They’d all agreed to honour Fangs, then mourn him._______Cheryl helps Toni with her emotions after Fangs’ death.





	To lose a brother

**Author's Note:**

> I felt like the last episode was missing the emotional response that Toni and Sweet Pea had to the death of their best friend, and so I wanted to explore how Cheryl could use her own grief to help with that emotional response. 
> 
> (Also I’ve been deliberately vague about the nature of the Serprents battle with the ghoulies, because who knows what will actually happen in the finale!)

They’d all agreed to honour Fangs, then mourn him. That act of honouring him, fighting for him, was long over, and Toni’s cut cheek and bruised rib cage was testament to the fact they had fought hard against the ghoulies. But the mist had cleared from Pickens park by midday, the serpents had crawled back to their home to tend to their wounds, and the mourning had begun.

 

They hadn’t spoken about it yet. They’d been tired from the fight, happy just to sit in Toni’s uncle’s trailer (he was a serpent yes, but a lazy one, and had of course chosen this week for a fishing trip, allowing them free run of the small space). At first, Cheryl had offered Thistle house to be their place of respite before remembering that just 24 hours previously Hal Cooper had put an axe through her bedroom door, so they’d ended up sitting on the worn sofa in the tiny trailer, clutching each other as to not fall apart entirely. She can’t help but think that a small worn trailer was closer to Fangs, closer to the memory of him.

 

Eventually they’d drifted over to sleep into Toni’s tiny twin bed with soft grey patterned covers. So, a couple of hours later, when Cheryl rolls over in her sleep and doesn’t immediately crash into her girlfriend, something is wrong. The bed barely fits the two of them, and for that second it feels massive, lonely. Cold.

 

She jerks upright. Cheryl quickly scans through the dark room, eyes drifting over piles of clothes, a wall full of Toni’s printed photographs, one half of a pair of Pom poms, a string of fairy lights on the ceiling... Toni is so present in all of it but so absent in that moment, and the panic that constricts her airways propels her out of the bed.

 

She doesn’t have to go far until she finds her girlfriend’s tiny form half asleep on the bathroom floor.The feeling of worry rises in her chest as the scent of sick hits her nose, and she sighs to herself as she picks her way over Toni’s curled up form and uses her phone torch to survey the scene. Toni is curled up on the linoleum in front of the toilet, face pale with tear tracks running down her cheeks. She’s clutching her mobile to her chest, and when Cheryl strains her ears, she can make out Fang’s voice, tinny through the speaker. Whatever small amount of food Toni has eaten since the beginning of the riots stares up at her from the bowl of the toilet, and so she flushes it away before pulling her girlfriend’s trembling form into her lap.

 

“I...I woke up. I couldn’t sleep and I forgot what had happened for long enough that I dialled Fangs up to ask if he wanted to go... go sit on the roof like we do when it’s just us against the world and then I heard his stupid voicemail and everything that’s happened flooded my head and it was all too much, so much that I just about made it to here and...” Her sudden outburst trails off into a sob that racks her body, and Cheryl begins to rub circles into the small of her back, trying to calm her and comfort her in any small way possible.

 

‘TT, you don’t have to talk about it. You don’t have to explain yourself if you don’t want to...”

 

From the odd angle they are sitting at, she can just make out Toni’s jaw clench, determined. “No. I want to. I need to say this all or I think I’ll burst.”

 

Cheryl is not the best at advice, at filling her sentences with warmth and using her words to comfort, but she can, at least, listen. And so she listens as Toni cries her way through her description of the last time she was with him, how Fangs’ Dad and little brothers showed up to Riverdale General after battling through the riots and so she’d stepped outside to give them privacy, how the Ghoulies had grabbed her in the chaos of the corridor, filled with injuries people from the mania outside, how she hadn’t been there for him when she’d promised she always would be.

 

“We met in the playground when I was five, literally tiny. He’d gotten himself into a fight with some older boys, they seemed huge at the time Cher. He had wanted a turn on the swings,’ she lets out a tiny laugh at the old memories, but it’s a weak sound, “and I stood up for him. We had rights to the swings for a whole week, Fangs, Sweet Pea and I. And we promised we’d never leave each other.” She takes a long breath, and Cheryl aches to see the amount of pain that the best person in her life was going through and to see that she was powerless against it. “And then when it actually counted, _I left him_.”

 

She quietens then, lost in her thoughts and relaxed by Cheryl’s touch, before adding bitterly, “We left each other.”

 

Cheryl knows she and Toni’s relationship was odd in its foundations. The love between the two of them had blossomed quickly, unexpectedly, in insane circumstances. Despite that, in the last few weeks, she’d come to know both Sweet Pea and Fangs well. Fangs Fogarty loved musicals, liked to bake for his little brothers, took AP history with her and was damn good at it, loved loved loved his two best friends. Knowing that he was suddenly gone- the loss, the tragedy left a little space inside of her, and she could hardly bear to imagine what it was doing to Toni. (Toni, who looks at Cheryl expectantly, looking for anything from a rebuttal to comfort. Toni, who looks lost and alone. Toni, who has the same look her eyes as she did all those months ago when she sat on the rocks at Sweetwater facing a Jason-less existence.)

 

“You’ve lost your brother.” She begins, uncertain. “And now you’re going to feel it all, TT. You’re going to feel sad, broken, like something is missing. You’re going to feel happy about the good memories. You’re going to feel like there’s nothing more to come, like nothing will ever be as good as him again,” Tonis breathing begins to calm slightly, as if she is listening intently, and so she keeps talking.

 

“You’re going to be angry. You’re going to wish he was here so you could shout at him, scream out all the pain of being left alone. You’re going to hate him. But TT, you’re going to keep loving him. Loving him for who he was, for who he helped to make you.”

 

Toni shifts in her position to face her, pink strands stuck to the wetness on her face, eyes wide, sorrowful, still so beautiful to her. “Cher...” she breathes.

 

“But most importantly Antionette Topaz...you’re not going to feel alone. I’m going to be here, every step through this, okay?” Her tone is reassuring, and the tiniest hint of light flickers back into her girlfriends eyes.

 

“Okay.”

 

It’s a while later that they pick themselves off the floor and warm themselves up again with their body heat in the tiny single bed. Both of them fall back into an uneasy rest, thinking of their lost brothers, but not alone.

 

(It’s not breaking into a secret compound or threatening gangsters with arrows, but it is a rescue.Cheryl and Toni save each other.)

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, as always comments are appreciated!


End file.
